Facebook Advertising Checklist For The Holiday Season

It’s the biggest sales season of the year. Here’s a quick list of Facebook and Instagram advertising tips from our Account Managers. Much of what we wrote on this topic last year about retargeting to your most valuable website visitors, understanding lifetime value and beating holiday ad fatigue still holds true, so they’re also worth a look.

Go mobile: Facebook users already spend most of their time online on their mobile devices. While conversion rates may be lower on mobile; mobile newsfeed, Instagram and audience network placements are great drivers of purchase intent that lead to people converting later on their desktop devices.

Customize creatives: Communicate your special holiday season offers clearly and match the creatives to your brand and best offerings.

Expand reach: Before and during the holiday season people who are not your regular customers are buying gifts and are more and more likely to convert. Expand your targeting reach with larger lookalikes, new seed audiences and Facebook's 'Holiday 2015' custom segment of people who are more engaged during this season.

Try out Audience Networks:Facebook’s Audience Networks are a new way to extend your advertising reach beyond Facebook and into other apps using the same creatives you’re already using in your campaigns.

Go Instagram: Best practices we have learned work well with Instagram ads include having exclusive content for your Instagram audience: behind-the-scenes material, exclusive discounts etc. It’s also good to use hashtags that are unique to your brand, and to bid high enough since reach in Instagram is still limited compared to Facebook placements.

Prepare to bid higher: More active purchase behaviour during the holidays attracts an increasing number of advertisers to compete for Facebook impressions. To get delivery, you will have to increase your maximum bid amounts, sometimes by quite a lot. Most businesses are able to leverage people's higher purchase intent to reach higher conversion rates, which compensates for increased CPM prices and provides delivery with roughly the same ROI as a result. Data from our clients shows that compared to other times of the year, average CPM prices increase 20-70% towards the end of year holidays and up to 100-150% during special days like Singles Day and Black Friday.

Remember to optimize: Customer behaviour during the sales season differs from other times of the year, so it’s even more important than usual to monitor audience performance and optimise bids, budget allocation and creatives accordingly. You might find some new audiences perform really well, while some of your regular audiences are not as competitive as before.